Saturday, December 27, 2014

Doni and Trish are gear heads, have 70's motorcycles, old trucks, and they started a magazine called Throttle Gals.

It's all about women and the rides, races, drives, off roading and wrenching.

All the vehicles featured are "Hers", but rides range from traditional hot rods, to choppers, Jeeps, trucks, different styles of race cars, dirt bikes, etc. This magazine focuses on the woman and her history with the vehicle, or her involvement in the automotive world.

Its premiere issue featured Athena Ransom, owner of Vagabond Choppers as its cover story, along with Amy Baas and her daily driver ’48 Dodge truck; Janell Bennet and her intriguing collection of cars.

Other issues featured Leslie Porterfield, who holds a land speed record on the salt flats of Bonneville and Casey Coker from Coker Tire.

Each issue also contains tech features, ranging from entry-level topics such as tire changing and fluid changes, to more advanced tech features such as forming metal, painting, and engine/drivetrain tech. Throttle Gals honors women from the past, who have pioneered the way, as well as those who are pushing the limits of today.

It was designed and engineered by Blake Larson whose life long desire to produce a practical concept car resulted in this unique design, in
which he was also hands on in the construction.

His concept was to give the driver as much vision as possible and he therefore put the driver seat in the middle with center steering and two full car width seats behind the driver and a fully glassed enclosed area front and back

It's not called a "van," but it's fair to describe the Waimea as a minivan cut down to station wagon height.

Kaiser's passenger cars died in 1955, but Kaiser had merged with Willys Overland in 1953, and Willys (Kaiser Jeep, after 1963) continued to build Jeep vehicles until 1970, when Edgar Kaiser sold out to AMC.

Kaiser is famous for never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The Kaisers (Henry and Edgar) were egotistical twits who refused to listen to automotove people. They received advice on the power plants, as better choices were available, but suggestions to improve both the 4 and 6's were never allowed. Few people know some 54 Kaisers were made with Oldsmobile V-8s and were stunning performers. When Ed Kaiser found out he had a tantrum and ordered all those cars destroyed. The company didn't have to die, it was murdered by the Kaisers. http://www.carlustblog.com/2010/05/1958-kaiser-waimea-minivan.html

Wayne Carini bought it a couple years ago. You can see that is has '65 Pontiac headlights, '63 GP parking lamps, and '57 Chevy bumper rubber tips

It's called Generation Gap, and the hosts are Hagerty expert Davin Reckow, who spends his days hunting down hard-to-find classic car parts and his nights wrenching on his two Chevelles, while Matt Lewis drives a 2011 Mitsubishi Evo X and spends his days interacting with classic car owners across the globe as Hagerty's social media analyst.

Davin thinks that nothing worth owning was built after 1974; Matt thinks that a car doesn't have to be old to be great. In this series, they each bring a car and try to convince the other how much better their car is

A tightening of credit since the recent crash has slowed sales of new homes but the market has been strong at the top end. Paradise Cove in Malibu is a trailer park inhabited by actors Pamela Anderson, Minnie Driver and Matthew McConaughey, where homes fetch up to $2.5m and come with marble floors.

Mobile homes make up 6.4% of the US housing sector and there are 8.5m of them, down slightly on 2011, according to the US Census. The number of occupants is not recorded but it's estimated to total about 20 million.

"In the Great Depression in the 1930s, people started living in trailers which were designed for travelling and vacationing but out of necessity, people started to make these tiny mobile units their homes," says Andrew Hurley, author of Diners, Bowling Alleys and Trailer Parks.

"They started parking them on the outskirts of cities and that's when they become associated with working class and impoverished people."

There was institutionalised discrimination, he says, as federal-backed mortgages were denied to owners of mobile homes, while zoning laws forced these communities to the very outskirts of towns and cities.

The 40s and 50s were their heyday, helped by the innovation of "double-wides", which meant they came in two separate units and formed a larger home.

"But the idea of permanent living in a mobile home didn't really catch on and by the 60s and 70s the private housing industry had caught up with demand so people that could afford to move out gave up their trailers for a more conventional suburban type of housing," says Hurley.

Ain't that cool! Multiple levels of cool, as it's a christmas present unexpectedly, published photos, photo credit for my blog in a book, useful for putting in a portfolio of published work if I ever need it, useful as a press pass listing if some event requires published work (SEMA and Comic Con) and it's an easy post (right here and now) plus a book to enjoy, because I love kombis!